President Joe Biden will announce Tuesday a change that would allow more than half a million spouses and children of U.S. citizens who have been living in the United States without authorization for more than a decade to apply for permanent residency without having to leave the country.

The program uses existing authorities to speed up the process for spouses and children who would normally qualify to adjust their status, rather than create a new program that would almost certainly be challenged in court.

The White House said the program would benefit approximately 500,000 noncitizen spouses of U.S. citizens, as well as 50,000 stepchildren of U.S. citizens who are under the age of 21.

The most notable change here is that spouses and children of U.S. citizens already living in the country will receive a three-year parole status for that would allow them to work for that period, and to apply for U.S. permanent residency without having to leave the United States and apply from abroad, as is currently the case.

The Biden administration said this move allows families to stay together because it encourages people who would otherwise be eligible to apply to do so, without having to leave their families in the U.S. for an undermined amount of time.

In order to apply, the spouses of U.S. citizens must have been living in the United States for the past 10 years, as of June 17, and be legally married to a U.S. citizen.

The White House said that, on average, the spouses who qualify to apply under the sped up process have been in the country for 23 years. Children of U.S. citizens must be unmarried and have been under the age of 18 when their parents were married.

In addition to spouses and children of U.S. citizens, Tuesday’s announcement will speed up the process for noncitizens who graduate from U.S. colleges and universities and receive a job offer in their chosen degree field to get a work visa. That includes Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, recipients and other undocumented youth.

The White House said this move recognizes the national interest in having workers educated in the United States stay and apply their skills in the country.

The changes announced on Tuesday do not guarantee that applicants will be able to adjust their status or get a work visa. Applications will be considered on case by case basis, according to White House officials. Existing disqualifications, such as criminal histories or having been deported previously, remain in place.

Some questions about those changes remain unanswered, for now. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that processes the applications, faces a massive backlog in applications that could impact the agency’s ability to prioritize and speed up the status adjustment process for spouses and children of U.S. citizens.

The White House said the application process under this change is expected to open by the end of the summer, but added that more details would be released soon, including costs and how to determine the validity of marriages.

Tuesday’s announcement comes on the heels of an executive action restricting access to the asylum system that the Biden administration implemented along the U.S.-Mexico border earlier this month. Those restrictions allow U.S. border officials to shut down asylum processing in between ports of entry when migrant encounters outside of border crossings surpass 2,500 per day.

Those changes immediately took effect at the border. In Mexican border cities such as Nogales, Sonora — where U.S. border officials have been removing hundreds of people each day — migrant advocates accuse the U.S. Border Patrol of denying Mexican migrants credible fear interviews, even if they express a fear of being returned to Mexico or claim they’re being persecuted.

Immigration and border security remain top concerns among voters, ahead of the Nov. 5 presidential election. Attempts by senators to pass a bipartisan agreement on the border, negotiated in part by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., failed in February after former president and presumed Republican nominee Donald Trump criticized the Biden-backed agreement.

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Biden speeds up green card process for spouses, kids of U.S. citizens